Page 7 of A Dead End Fourth of July (Tiger’s Eye Mysteries #14)

Jack

"That was weird," Shelley said, buckling her seatbelt without prompting, because she was a smart kid. Adorable and smart as a whip.

"Why are whips supposed to be smart?"

"What?"

I shook my head. "Never mind. But yes. That was weird. And a good reason not to play with magical items."

"I didn’t play with it! And I didn’t know it was magical!" She glared at me. "It’s not fair to blame me for something I didn’t know about. I just thought it was pretty, and it would look nice on Aunt Ruby, and maybe she’d quit being mad at me for the school thing."

"The school thing. Right. What is that about anyway?"

She rolled her bright blue eyes and shoved her light brown hair away from her face. "I don’t think I should go back to normal-kid school. I should go to a school for witches."

I slammed on the brakes when a cow ambled out of the field through a broken length of fence and wandered onto the road.

"That looks like one of Mr. Rooster’s cows," Shelley said, pulling out her phone. "I’ll text him to come get her."

"Yeah, it’s Rooster’s field. Tell him I’m sending her his way." I pulled off the road, put the truck into park and walked out to meet the cow.

"Time to go back home," I told her.

The cow, being a cow, looked at me with enormous, gentle, and completely uncomprehending eyes.

I waved my arms at her and moved to her right, so I could herd her back where she’d come from, which of course made her immediately want to go in the opposite direction.

"Listen, cow, I’m not in the mood," I told the creature. "I look at you and see steaks and hamburger, so if you don’t want—"

"UNCLE JACK!" Shelley yelled from the truck. "Don’t scare her!"

Yeah. The twelve-hundred-pound cow was absolutely scared of me.

Ha.

Even in my tiger shape, I was only five hundred pounds.

I felt the grin forming even as I thought it.

Maybe tiger me weighed less than half of what Bessie here was hefting, but there was one key difference: tiger me was a predator.

In a flash, I shifted shape into the Bengal tiger that formed the other side of my dual nature. Then I prowled up and stared into the cow’s eyes.

The animal, who’d certainly never seen or smelled a tiger in her entire bovine life, yawned in my face.

Mildly insulted, I stalked around to block her path across the road, and her big head swung to watch me. Then I turned to face her.

And I roared.

The cows of Dead End, Florida, may have never seen a tiger before, but this one was no fool. She bellowed, turned tail, kicked up her heels, and ran.

Luckily, she ran straight back into her field and up the slight elevation toward Rooster’s barn.

Unluckily, she kicked me in the head first.

I was lying on the pavement, staring up at the sky, wondering why the clouds were spinning around like carousel horses, when Shelley walked up, stood over me, and looked down. Since her face was upside down, it added to the bizarre carnival effect going on in my brain.

I tried to ask her why she was upside down.

"Rowr?"

"You’re still a tiger, Uncle Jack."

Oh.

Wincing at the pain in my head, I shifted back to human.

Through some fortunate quirk of the shifter magic, I pulled clothes into the shift, so I never turned back to human in my birthday suit like a lot of shapeshifters did.

So now, I was lying on the pavement in my jeans, T-shirt, and running shoes, with a headache the size of Alaska.

"Maybe you should get up before a car comes," she said, giving me a worried look.

"Yeah," I managed.

She held out her tiny hand to help me up, and I gently took it so as not to hurt her feelings. Then I climbed to my feet, feeling like I’d been run over by a truck.

Or a cow.

Stupid cow.

"I’m definitely eating steak for dinner," I muttered.

"Uncle Jack!" Shelley, the staunch vegetarian, gasped.

"Sorry." I brushed myself off and trudged over to the fence, where I muscled the downed rail back into place, wedging it against the fencepost. "Text Rooster to fix this bit of fence, will you? That should fool them for a little while."

We got back in the truck. I drove while Shelley texted, and then we carefully avoided the subject of witch school all the way to the swamp.

"You know, you don’t have to call me Uncle Jack if you don’t want to," I ventured. "I’m technically your brother-in-law now that I married Tess. You could just call me Jack."

She wrinkled her cute little nose. "Euw. That’s too weird. I’ll stick to Uncle Jack until I’m old, like you."

Old like me. Great.

I could almost feel my hair turning gray.

"Then I’ll call you Jack."

"I’m good with that." I felt a wave of warmth somewhere near my heart, which kept getting feelings these days.

Weird.

"So, I’m planning to sneak out of the house on the Fourth of July and go to Orlando to see the fireworks at Disney with Zane and his cousin in high school who just got his driver’s license," she continued, and all those warm feelings plummeted from my heart to the top of my head, where they exploded.

I picked up my phone. "Tess? Do you want to tell me about any side effects of that magical truth-telling pin thingy?"

"Funny you asked," she said, sounding surprised. "I just talked to the seller, and after I pushed him for five minutes, he admitted that the truth-telling magic can last for hours after you take off the pin."

"And?"

"And he claims that if someone else put the pin on you, that person also gets the truth-telling whammy."

"I see. Well, guess what?"

"What?"

"He wasn’t lying."

Shelley narrowed her eyes at me. "You'd better not tell her what I just said, or I’m going to tell everybody about the cow, Uncle Jack."

I gave her my best "terrify the evil vampires" scowl, but she stuck her tongue out at me.

"Jack? What did Shelley say about a cow?"

"Never mind. I’ll call you later."

"Okay," she said slowly. "Love you. Talk to you later."

"Love you, too."

"Mwah, mwah!" Shelley said, making kissing noises. "You guys are so sappy."

"You and I are going to have a talk, young lady. You are definitely not going to Orlando with some kid who just learned how to drive."

She clapped her hands over her mouth and groaned. "I can’t believe I told you that!"

"It’s a side effect of the pin."

"Great! Just great. This is why I need to go to magic school."

"We’ll talk about that later, too. For now, we’re here. Try not to tell anybody any other secrets, okay?"

We pulled into the parking lot of the Swamp Commando Airboat Rides, and Shelley cheered. "Yay! Can I go on the boat?"

"You’ll have to ask Lucky and the guys, but we have time if you want to go for a ride."

She was out of the truck almost before I finished my sentence, racing toward a group of tourists waiting to board the airboat.

I shook my head, which was a mistake, and then I dug in the glove compartment for some headache medicine.

Even a shapeshifter metabolism wasn't curing this headache quickly.

"Did we ever have that kind of energy?" Lucky asked, ambling over to meet me when I climbed out of the truck with the bags of food. "What happened to you?"

"A cow kicked me in the head. And I doubt it.

" I watched Shelley jump up and down with excitement, chattering away a mile a minute to Mickey Young and Darius Jones.

"Do you have room for her to go on the boat with that group?

I need to talk to the Fox twins about something. As you can see, I brought lunch."

"I'm not even going to ask about the cow. What you get up to in your weird tiger ways isn't for the likes of me to know," he said solemnly, his lips quirking against the grin trying to surface. "For Shelley, anything."

He grabbed the drinks and followed me over to the picnic table. "But this isn’t a group going out. This group just came back, and they’re all whining because no gators showed up, so they didn’t get the selfies they wanted."

Lucky Tremaine, former soldier, amateur guitarist, and unofficial head of the airboat business, looked like a blond, blue-eyed surfer. His eyes held darkness, though, from what he’d seen in combat. He’d become a good friend and someone I could count on since I’d moved home to Dead End.

"Really? No gators? That’s unusual."

He shrugged, grabbed a sandwich out of the bag, and started unwrapping it. "It’s not like we can guarantee when the local wildlife will feel like making an appearance."

"I’m surprised they’re not asking for their money back."

He grimaced. "Some of them are. But we have a big ‘no refund’ sign right next to the ‘we don’t guarantee gator sightings’ sign."

I nodded, my mind moving past disgruntled tourists to a missing granddaughter, and unloaded the lunch stuff. "Sorry, man. So, are Dallas and Austin around? I need to ask them to do some computer stuff for me. I have a client who—"

"Uh, Jack?"

I kept setting out sandwiches and chips. "Yeah?"

"I think we may be in trouble."

I looked up to see his eyes widening and his mouth falling open as he stared at something over my shoulder, and every nerve in my body shot into overdrive.

Shelley.

When I whirled around, I had to blink—hard—before I could believe my eyes.

The tourists had bunched up into a tightly packed group, all of them holding their phones and cameras in shaking hands, taking pictures and video and who the heck even knew what of the gators they’d wanted so desperately to see.

The seven gators.

The seven huge gators.

All of whom were clambering up out of the water and onto the dock toward one small, pink-cheeked, ten-year-old witch.